Find something that is undervalued significantly, dress it up with great tech/service/usability, and dominate that area. Odds are it won't be anything in the mainstream tech circles (ie- realtime web).
Ask HN: I made $24k over the last month. Now what?
21–30 of 207 posts
Re: Ask HN: I made $24k over the last month. Now what?
#22Clickable graph link: http://imgur.com/T0z5p.png
Re: Ask HN: I made $24k over the last month. Now what?
#23you can do what Jacques does, he also has a "passive" income from one of his sites, so he makes a few small time investments here and there. You really don't need a lot of money to invest. Just look at the HN model. As an angel all you need is 25K to get into most early rounds.
That's pretty risky - you'd need to put 25K into one company to make it worthwhile for the company. Angel investing is like VC on crack; you have to spread your investments around because the failure rate is likely going to be well over 50%. The goal is to make the 1 or 2 in 10 that succeed pay off well enough to obviate the cost of the failures.
Re: Ask HN: I made $24k over the last month. Now what?
#24Build a business using it. Pithy version:
1. Look for a niche that hang around online, but don't know much about web stuff. Mumsy things, crafts... anything that's a tightly knit niche
2. Find their forums/blogs etc, and ask them what would make their lives easier? What would be the one thing that would be awesome that they want.
3. Build it. Possibly hire people to help you
4. Have a free, lightly crippled version (so it's still highly useful and awesome, but clear there's more awesome where that came from if they cough up)
5. Hire (hint hint) an awesome marketer and copywriter to design, write and perform ongoing analysis and optimisation of the sales funnel, traffic generation and site navigation
6. Reinvest the money in entering more niches, and refining the process
You should be able to launch a site a month, with an average sales volume of 7-15k from each site after 6 months or so. 12 months down the line, that should be earning you upwards of 100k p/m sustainably, with a max of 4 employees. I'm fairly sure you can live off that.
Re: Ask HN: I made $24k over the last month. Now what?
#25Hire people to do the things you do which have the worst tradeoff of hours expended per unit of value added. Alternately, hire people to automate those things.
And I'd SERIOUSLY consider at the very least a) setting yourself up a SEP-IRA and b) socking away the maximum in an index fund. It is essentially monopoly money to you anyhow at the moment, right? Trust me, you won't regret having 30 years of appreciation on your monopoly money when you retire. (This will also simplify your tax planning for this year.) Index funds are a no maintenance investment -- as long as you can pretend that the money doesn't exist, you can get by with checking them once a year (or less!)
Re: Ask HN: I made $24k over the last month. Now what?
#26I once read "Never give financial advice for free: if it is good advice, you won't get credit, and if it is bad advice -- you'll get the blame". You should consider why anyone here would give you advice on how to turn xx,xxx into millions quickly. HN is full of smart people who are fully capable of getting their hands on that much in vc/other leverage and doing it themselves. Any advice they give you, from a purely c…
Because there's more than enough customers in the world to everyone else wealthy too?
Re: Ask HN: I made $24k over the last month. Now what?
#27My honest opinion is to bank the remaining after taxes - especially if you don't have six months living expenses set aside in a money market fund or something like that. If you do have that, then use it to buy other people's time to make your small apps.
Re: Ask HN: I made $24k over the last month. Now what?
#28First, congratulations; that's a pretty impressive feat on the app store. Have you thought about taking some of the income and using it to hire other developers to increase the number of apps that you've got being developed at once? It seems like you know what works and doesn't work on the app store, so it would probably make sense to start trying to make your efforts scale up.
To add to icey's comment, why not use the money to develop a framework (or build on an existing framework) to be able to port your apps to other mobile platforms?
Re: Ask HN: I made $24k over the last month. Now what?
#29Hrm, I think you're forgetting about the most important money making tool available: compound growth. Let's assume the following:
You invest your current 24,000 and each month you add 20,000 to your investment. Let's further assume that you can achieve an annual return of 3.5% and that return is evenly distributed over the year. In this scenario you'd end up with $520k after two years. You're half way to being a millionaire.
If you instead contributed $25k each month you'd end up with nearly $650k after two years. That's 50k above your contributed principal or an 8.3% return over two years. Further, your risk is significantly reduced over any other get rich quick scheme and this allows you to continue to focus on what you're doing.
Re: Ask HN: I made $24k over the last month. Now what?
#30Just travel, with a small laptop (for support). You'll be able to live for over a year on that money in places like New Zealand, China, India, etc etc. Or rent/buy a small RV and see rural America!
Why rural america? I've driven through my fair share of it and lived in it for a long time, and based on this heuristic I've got to say that you will mostly just be seeing large expanses of farm fields.
With the kind of money he has: Costa Rica, South of France, Tahiti, [insert sunny place]. Mojito Island